The roi of marketing automation

The ROI of Marketing Automation


1

Introduction
Today’s fastest growing companies are using repeatable marketing and sales 2.0
techniques to grow revenue predictably and reliably. They are embracing the
shift from the selling process to the buying process, moving marketing from a
cost center to a revenue generator. By replacing the old linear sales model with
a new holistic approach, companies are redeﬁning the way marketing and sales
teams work together.
The new buying landscape has changed marketing’s approach to lead generation
and management. This tectonic shift has created a need to improve upon
outdated systems that can no longer keep up with the demand to increase lead
flow, ensure lead quality, and prove program effectiveness and ROI.
Companies that implement a marketing automation system to support their
marketing and sales efforts are better equipped to manage lead flow and
process leads more efficiently. This paper outlines how marketing automation
optimizes marketing programs and can help companies:

Today’s marketing teams are
taking more responsibility for
revenue, delivering more strategic
support to sales teams and striving to
close more business more efficiently.
Marketing automation systems
achieve this goal quickly and easily.”

• Create a faster and more predictable revenue cycle
• Increase profitability with tactics that result in higher conversion rates
• Align the efforts of marketing and sales teams to substantially increase
top-line revenue growth
This paper is a resource for anyone considering investing in a marketing
automation system. Through real-world statistics and case studies, this paper
outlines how the tools unique to marketing automation systems can be
implemented to reap significant increases in the bottom line.

© 2012 Marketo, Inc | +1.877.260.MKTO (6586) | www.marketo.com | www.twitter.com/marketo | blog.marketo.com

2

Optimized Marketing Programs
When companies implement a lead management process using a marketing
automation system, they improve their interactions with prospects from the
initial point of inquiry through closed deal. Through systematic digital profiling,
and behavioral and demographic scoring capabilities, marketing automation
systems can create highly-targeted campaigns that reach the right people, with
the right message at the right time in the buying cycle.
Marketing automation systems also allow companies to produce complete
marketing programs—from email creation and landing page design to launching
complex drip and nurture campaigns—in a fraction of the time that it takes
companies who are not using such systems.
Several companies stand out as examples of how to effectively use marketing
automation systems to optimize marketing programs.

On-demand billing solution company, Vindicia, has launched a successful
webinar series, which helped to improve lead quality and reduce cost-perlead. By focusing on the right prospect with the right content at the right
time, they can have more meaningful conversations with prospects which
result in higher conversion rates. Seamless integration with salesforce.com,
combined with insightful demographic and behavioral data, has shortened
deal cycles and improved customer engagement.
The following case study outlines how IDology used marketing automation
services to target their messaging, focus database segmentation and create
agile campaigns—all while reducing resources.

Acteva, an online event registration service, has achieved 350% ROI and 100%
annual growth in areas where they have leveraged marketing automation. These
initiatives have saved $400,000 and delivered $2 million in incremental
gross revenue.



3

CASE STUDY: IDology
After a one-day implementation
of Marketo, we doubled
the effectiveness of our marketing
programs, and improved lead quality
and marketing and sales alignment.”
- Jodi Florence, Marketing Director

IDology provides on-demand, real-time technology solutions that verify
an individual’s identity and age in consumer-not-present situations. Before
implementing a marketing automation system, the company had no automated
way to nurture leads, and prospects received emails on an ad hoc basis. In
addition, they couldn’t track marketing’s actions in Salesforce CRM, so sales reps
received leads without knowing the history of previous interactions. IDology
needed a solution that would eliminate manual processes and automatically
track each lead source.
Solution: IDology considered several marketing automation solutions and
ultimately chose one that offered an easy-to-use platform and tight integration
with Salesforce. Within a few days the company had created personalized
landing pages and was able to automatically segment leads. By automating
these tasks, IDology’s marketing team was able to focus more time on
strategic activities.
Beneﬁts: IDology now delivers twice the number of marketing programs with
the same budget. Automated email campaigns, web activity tracking and list
segmentation capabilities have doubled marketing eﬃciency and yielded a
25% improvement in monthly ad conversion rates. IDology has improved their
marketing and sales alignment and increased marketing visibility and reputation
as a source of revenue.
Marketing automation is a valuable tool for marketers. It makes fast work of
programs that have historically required vast amounts of manual effort and
provides a quick and easy way to develop new programs that would have been
logistically impossible in the past. With the savings in time and resources,
marketers can strategically push deals through the pipeline with greater speed
and accuracy, providing a direct impact on top-line revenue growth.


4

Increasing Conversion Rates
Marketo’s Revenue Cycle illustrates the stages that leads go through from
names to qualify to close. Between each of the stages lay conversion points.
With the insight and methods available through a marketing automation system,
marketing professionals are able to tighten the screws at the conversion point
that will garner the most return. Systematically improving upon every stage in
which a lead moves forward, or drops out, can result in a rapid increase
in revenue.
First of all, marketing automation will provide a huge productivity boost for
marketing. Where marketing previously had to run campaigns manually, they
can now run fully and automatically. The result: marketing can run more
campaigns with fewer people, and still deliver more qualified leads to sales.

By analyzing each conversion stage, the marketing team is able to
determine where it can improve upon its tactics or processes to have a
direct, and often immediate, impact on program success.
Let’s look at each conversion stage in more detail, and demonstrate how
different companies have used marketing automation at various stages in
the cycle. See how implementing small changes (e.g.: automating manual
processes, decreasing campaign and asset development time, better
segmenting a database or prioritizing and qualifying leads prior to sales
hand-off) can result in increases in sales productivity, decreases in the time
needed to close a deal, increase contract values and lower overall cost
per opportunity.

Marketing automation also gives marketing teams better metrics on how their
campaigns are performing, and more options to improve those campaigns. You’ll
see that response to campaigns can easily double when marketing automation
technology is used properly.

Target Market

Additionally, marketing’s response times are much shorter. If there is a shortterm need for a particular campaign, it’s now much faster to design and roll out
that campaign. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t carefully plan your campaigns,
but if there is a need to respond quickly, you now can.

But it’s not just marketing that benefits from automation. Sales will receive more
qualified leads, with more information about each lead. Rather than sending an
segmented list of leads to sales, they can now get a prioritized leads of leads,
sorted by lead score. They can even add their favorite leads to a “watch list”, to
be proactively notified all new activities by these leads.


Qualification to Close

6

Conversion Stage One: Names to Marketing
Qualified Leads
Before implementing a marketing automation system, GroundWork Open
Source (GWOS), a developer of commercial open source systems and network
management software, had an efficiency challenge in setting up and executing
marketing campaigns. Their target database was incomplete and diﬃcult to
segment, making lead nurturing campaigns nearly impossible.
Using marketing automation, GWOS is now able to analyze weekly trends
and buying behaviors to drive revenue in a more targeted, strategic manner.
Marketing automation enables the GWOS team to quickly setup and execute
email drip and nurture campaigns. By using progressive proﬁling functionality
on their web forms, GWOS can adhere to open source privacy standards while
preserving the ability to monitor web activity. By leveraging lead scoring results,
status updates and behavior monitors, the GWOS marketing team is able to
distinguish between leads that are sales-ready from those that require more
time in the decision making process. They are also able to tailor their messaging
and campaigns to leads in
different stages.

Conversion Stage

Average
process

Strong
process

Best-in-class
process

Names to Marketing
Qualified Leads

3.9

5.8

9.7

Marketing Qualified Leads
to Sales Accepted Leads

58.3

65.6

74.5

Sales Accepted Leads to
Sales Qualified Leads

49.1

56.4

60.5

Sales Qualified Leads
to Customers

23.1

26.9

30.7



7

Take a look at our benchmark stats to see conversion rates by marketing program maturity

45%

1 in 21

40%
35%

1 in 48

30%
25%
20%

1 in 325
31%

28%

10%

0%

1 in 63

1 in 73

15%

5%

Name to MQL
MQL to SQL
SQL to Win

18% 16%

23% 22%

24%

33%

37%

40%

28%

24% 26% 25%

Source: Marketo Benchmark on Revenue Performance
as of May 11, 2012 (N=300)

11%

Demand

Integrated Pipeline

Revenue
Performance
Management

GWOS has launched email campaigns that communicate a meaningful message
to a segmented audience in minutes, re-engaged thousands of touch-and-go
leads, dramatically improved visibility into its customer database and improved
lead quality.

Average

“At GWOS, we’ve accelerated our revenue cycle, closing more business
faster using greater sales eﬃciency,” says Jesse Eschenroeder, Marketing
Manager. “Leveraging solutions including Marketo Sales Insight, we’ve
quadrupled our customer base in eight months.” The marketing team
can now measure campaign eﬀectiveness and fine-tune their efforts in
real time, driving more inquiries from just names in a database to highlyengaged, marketing-qualified leads.


8

Conversion Stage Two: Marketing Qualified Leads to
Sales Accepted Leads
Before introducing marketing automation, ShipServ, the leading e-marketplace
for maritime shipping, faced challenges of flexibility and scale. ShipServ is
relatively small –120 employees – but its sphere of opportunity covers the globe.
Since the marketing staff was small and had a limited budget, they needed
a solution that could help them create more qualified opportunities without
creating a burden on their already taxed staff.
Using marketing automation, ShipServ is able to eliminate manual processes,
automate demand generation and lead management, and prioritize and
qualify sales-ready leads. ShipServ’s marketing and sales teams collaborated to
implement a sophisticated lead scoring framework for two distinct sales teams
– high volume telesales and longer-term, high-value direct sales – which helped
move more leads through the demand waterfall. This resulted in more highquality leads that were readily accepted by the sales team.
Since leveraging marketing automation, ShipServ’s marketing team is driving
275% more opportunities and 1,600 net-new qualified opportunities per year.
ShipServ has reduced its campaign management burden by 80% while boosting
the number of sales-ready leads.

“In our second year of using Marketo, we now drive significantly more
sales opportunities with the same budget and have increased sales-ready
leads by 400%,” says John Watton, VP Marketing. A significant reduction
in manual processes has allowed the marketing team to focus on more
strategic and creative initiatives, including a social media engagement
campaign. Using these strategies, ShipServ achieved 100% marketing ROI in
three months.

In our second year of using
Marketo, we now drive
significantly more sales opportunities
with the same budget and have
increased sales-ready leads by 400%.”
- John Watton, VP Marketing, ShipServ



7

Conversion Stage Three: Sales Accepted Leads to Sales
Qualified Leads
Before deploying their marketing automation system, Cloud9 Analytics—a global
leader of on-demand operational performance management solutions—had no
viable way to sufficiently fuel its revenue cycle. Drip email campaigns aimed at
generating new leads were run manually, a process that was time consuming,
inefficient and not scalable.
Today, Cloud9 Analytics uses a marketing automation system for email marketing
and lead nurturing campaigns that helps establish and maintain a trusted
relationship with both existing and prospective customers. “Our campaigns
have yielded a 20% boost in lead-to-opportunity conversion rates and a higher
probability to close,” reports Julie Perino, Director of Marketing. Triggered by
lead scoring, qualified leads are automatically routed to the Cloud9 Analytics
inside sales team for priority attention. Cloud9 Analytics can now support
international partners with targeted marketing campaigns that have been cloned
and customized for different regions.
With marketing automation, the Cloud9 Analytics marketing team has
significantly reduced its reliance on outside resources and is doing more with
less. A single power user is required to execute email marketing and lead
nurturing campaigns that would previously have required three to four resources
to complete.


10

Conversion Stage Four: Sales Qualified Leads
to Customers
Without an automated system in place, Codesion, leading provider in subversion
hosting and the cloud service unit of Collabnet Inc., lacked the capacity to
process hundreds of free trial accounts per month. Once engaged, its small
marketing team found it impossible to provide ongoing support to leads during
the 30-day trial period. In addition, it was difficult and time consuming to create
professional landing pages and build sophisticated email marketing campaigns
without relying on outside resources. The team needed to easily identify salesready leads and track conversion rates from initial web visit to trial conversion
and up-sell.

As a prospect moves through the different stages of the Demand Waterfall,
marketing automation allows companies to systematically target prospects.
By making strategic improvements at each stage, marketing professionals
have an unparalleled ability to quickly and effectively tailor their approach
to each prospect, delivering personalized messaging to potential clients
which ultimately impacts the bottom line with increased revenues.

Codesion implemented a marketing automation solution that enables its small
marketing team to build professional-quality landing pages and automated
email marketing campaigns. Codesion now manages a sophisticated email drip
campaign that provides on-boarding support, expert advice and relevant content
over 30 days for hundreds of prospective buyers every month.
With marketing automation, Codesion is able to fully automate its Free Trials
Program. Its marketing team can now manage their high-volume trial requests
and has improved its email open and click-through rates by 10%. In addition,
Codesion is using insights provided through reporting and analytics tools to
measure a 10–15% increase in trial conversions. Knowing that 68% of all trial
participants eventually become customers has resulted in a substantial increase
to the bottom line.



11

Marketing and Sales Alignment
When marketing and sales teams share the same vision of what their
revenue cycle looks like and how to best manage it, they can create dramatic
improvements in marketing ROI, sales productivity and, most importantly,
top-line growth.

The following case study demonstrates how eChalk uses marketing
automation to better communicate with clients throughout their extensive
sales cycle.

In many companies, interactions between sales and marketing teams are
disconnected at best, resulting in a breakdown in communications with
prospects. Marketing automation aligns sales and marketing teams and
streamlines the data collection process. With a single repository for lead
records, prospects are tracked in real time, and members of both teams can
easily track and nurture leads with up-to-date information.
With marketing automation systems, sales and marketing teams:
• Unite to optimize the revenue cycle
• Gain visibility and share accountability for leads and revenue
• Create dramatic improvements in marketing ROI, sales productivity and
top-line revenue growth
Marketing automation systems are heralded by members of both sales and
marketing because of the team collaboration that naturally evolves through
the implementation of the tool. Some of the immediate benefits noted by
users include:
• Streamlined data collection processes
•
•
•
•

Improved data quality
Real-time insight into lead behavior
Strong lead nurturing throughout the lead management process
Lead generation tracking and reporting

12

CASE STUDY: eChalk
eChalk, a SaaS-based organization that helps school leaders, teachers,
students and parents safely use the web to connect to learning,
information and each other, needed a way to make its lead nurturing
processes more effective throughout the entire revenue cycle. eChalk’s
marketing, sales and client services teams wanted to automate their email
marketing campaigns and integrate them with their existing CRM system
(Salesforce.com). They were searching for an intuitive and collaborative
solution that would help their sales and client services teams automate
and accelerate customer and prospect outreach.
Solution: eChalk reevaluated their marketing processes. By implementing
a marketing automation system they redefined key metrics used for goals
and reporting and updated their lead scoring processes and procedures.
Utilizing marketing automation, they are better able to monitor, manage
and tie revenue results to their marketing and sales efforts.
Benefits: Marketing automation supports and accelerates eChalk’s complex
and lengthy sales cycle with automated email and nurturing campaigns as
well as advanced lead management programs. Readily available insight into
a prospect’s digital behavior helps eChalk’s sales and client services teams
better understand, prioritize and interact with the hottest leads.
Marketing automation aligns sales and marketing teams so that they can
track and nurture leads accurately and efficiently. Streamlining processes
allows companies to expedite prospect outreach and link marketing and
sales efforts to profits.



13

Conclusion
Today’s marketing teams are taking more responsibility for revenue,
delivering more strategic support to sales teams and striving to close
more business more efficiently.
Simply increasing database size through purchasing lists, creating
inbound buzz or launching outbound campaigns will have little impact if
a company is unable to manage the influx of names properly. Companies
must be able to keep up with increase lead flow, ensure lead quality and
prove program effectiveness.
To maximize the profitability of every inquiry, be it from prospect or
existing customer, companies need a solution that supports both the
marketing and sales teams, such as funnel filling programs and laser
focused campaigns that propel inquiries into prospects and prospects
into customers.
Marketing automation systems achieve this goal quickly and easily.
Companies that have implemented such systems have enjoyed highly
aligned and optimized marketing and sales teams, faster and more
predictable revenue cycles and increased proﬁtability.


About Marketo
Marketo is the fastest growing provider in Revenue Performance Management. Marketo’s powerful yet
easy-to-use marketing automation and sales effectiveness solutions transform how marketing and sales
teams of all sizes work — and work together — to drive dramatically increased revenue performance and
fuel business growth. The company’s proven technology, comprehensive services and expert guidance
are helping more than 1,800 enterprise and mid-market companies around the world to turn marketing
from a cost centre to a business-building revenue driver. Marketo also offers Spark by Marketo™, a new
brand of marketing automation tailored specifically for small businesses – the fastest-growing and largest
segment of today’s economy.
Marketo was recently named one of “America’s Most Promising Companies” by Forbes Magazine, the
fastest-growing private company of 2011 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, and the “2011 CRM
Market Leaders Awards Winner for Marketing Solutions” by CRM Magazine.

Headquarters
901 Mariners Island Blvd. Suite 200
San Mateo, CA 94404
Marketo EMEA Ltd.

For more information:

Cairn House

Visit www.marketo.com, or subscribe to Marketo’s

South County Business Park

award-winning blogs at blog.marketo.com.

Leopardstown
Dublin 18, Ireland

Call us at +1.877.260.MKTO (6586)

Phone: +353.1.242.3000

Email us at sales@marketo.com

The roi of marketing automation

The roi of marketing automation

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